6.  The applicant was born in 1962 and lives in Piešťany.
7.  The applicant is a lawyer. He used to be a public prosecutor and is now a practising member of the Slovak bar association.
8.  Between August 1999 and March 2001 the applicant acted as the legal representative of several industrial companies belonging to a group associated with a strategic steelworks in eastern Slovakia. For a period of time starting on 18 April 2001 he was on the board of directors of the company owning the works.
9.  In 1999 the Minister of the Interior set up a special team of investigators to investigate large-scale organised criminal activities of a financial nature which were supposedly being committed in connection with a company belonging to the above group. The team was composed of officers from the financial police.
10.  On an unspecified date the investigators charged an individual, I.C., with aggravated fraud.
11.  On an unspecified date the investigators applied for judicial authorisation to tap the applicant’s telephone. At an unspecified time a judge of the Bratislava Regional Court granted the authorisation. The applicant’s professional mobile phone was subsequently tapped.
12.  In November 2000 the applicant learned that calls from his phone were being intercepted; that the interception was being carried out by the financial police; and that the contents of his telephone communications were known outside the police.
13.  On 5 January 2001 the applicant received an anonymous letter confirming the above information and advising him that the interception had taken place from October to December 2000 and had been carried out at the request of opponents of his clients.
14.  On 31 May 2001 and 1 June 2001 a daily paper published interviews with the Minister of the Interior and the chief of the Police Corps. From those interviews the applicant understood that there had been confirmation that the interception had actually taken place.
15.  Verbatim records of the applicant’s calls had been leaked to various interest groups, politicians and journalists, as well as to representatives of several legal persons.
16.  Thus in September 2001 the daily Sme received by mail a transcript of the applicant’s telephone conversation with a journalist of Radio Free Europe. On 13 October 2001 Sme published a statement by a politician who had declared at a press conference that he possessed approximately 300 pages of copies of transcripts of the applicant’s telephone conversations.
17.  In summer 2002 the applicant was informed that verbatim records of his conversations with third persons which had been made by the financial police were freely accessible on a website. They included conversations with his colleagues, clients, the representative of the other party in a case, and friends. The records had been manipulated in that they included statements which the applicant and the other persons involved had not made.
18.  On 15 and 29 January 2001 the applicant informed the Inspection Service of the Ministry of the Interior (“the Inspection Service”) that he had been warned in a letter signed “member of the Financial Police” about the interception of his telephone. He claimed that the interception was unlawful and unjustified and accused one or more unknown police officers of having abused their official authority. The applicant stated that an appropriate investigation should be carried out into the matter in accordance with the law.
19.  The director of the special division of the financial and criminal police (odbor zvláštnych úloh správy kriminálnej a finančnej polície) lodged a criminal complaint as, on the basis of his own examination of the case file, he had come to the conclusion that the interception contravened sections 36 and 37 (1) of the Police Corps Act 1993 (see Relevant domestic law and practice below). This was so in particular because it had not been based on any specific suspicion against the person being targeted and no specific purpose had been indicated. In his view, the members of the special investigative team had abused their official authority within the meaning of Article 158 of the Criminal Code.
20.  On 10 May 2001 the judge who had authorised the interception made a written statement to the President of the Regional Court. The judge stated that the request for the authorisation had met all formal and substantive requirements. In his view, the police director had no authority to challenge the authorisation. The judge therefore considered it inappropriate to address the substance of the director’s objections. He nevertheless remarked, in general, that requests for authorisation were made in writing, but were submitted in person. The officer submitting the request had presented the case orally and the oral presentation was usually more comprehensive than the written request. As requests for authorisation had to be handled with the utmost urgency, judges had had no realistic opportunity to examine the case file or to check that the request for authorisation corresponded to the contents of the case file. Furthermore, the information in the case file was often obtained from unverifiable sources. Judges therefore had to rely on the information in the request for authorisation, which presupposed a certain element of trust. The judge further observed that there had been an enormous increase in the workload concerning tapping and that this was due, inter alia, to an inter‑agency agreement which had been reached under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice (see Relevant domestic law and practice below) and had extended the jurisdiction of the Bratislava Regional Court in this area. In his view, questions of jurisdiction should not be regulated by “agreements” but by statute, which was not the case in relation to tapping. The judge stated that telephone tapping had been authorised on three previous occasions in the course of the investigation into the suspected extensive criminal transactions within the industrial group mentioned above. He had thus had sufficient and detailed knowledge about the applicant’s case. The judge associated himself completely with the decision taken, although the suspicion against the applicant might later have been dispelled. This was nothing unusual and happened in 10-20% of cases.
21.  On 22 May 2001 the applicant asked the General Prosecutor to take measures with a view to eliminating unlawful interception and recording of telephone conversations.
22.  On 20 June 2001 the Inspection Service questioned the applicant in connection with his complaint. According to the applicant, since then there has been no official communication concerning his complaint and he has not been informed of the outcome of the investigation.
23.  On 21 June and 2 July 2001 the Inspection Service requested that the Ministry of the Interior discharge members of the special investigative team from the obligation of confidentiality in respect of the subject matter of the investigation. The Ministry agreed on 9 and 10 July 2001 respectively.
24.   On 31 August 2001 the General Prosecutor’s Office informed the applicant, in reply to his above request of 22 May 2001, that the framework for the interference was defined by Article 22 § 2 of the Constitution and the relevant statutory provisions including the Police Corps Act 1993. Decree no. 66/1992 defined the court’s jurisdiction in such matters in cases where criminal proceedings had not been brought. The fact that the relevant issue was not governed by a law was only a formal shortcoming. Moreover, a draft law had been prepared to cover the relevant issue.
25.  Between 5 and 20 September 2001 the Inspection Service questioned four members of the investigative team. Their depositions included, inter alia, the information that the operative part of the team had been colluding with the applicant; that the applicant had been in close contact with I.C. (see paragraph 10 above); that the applicant had been involved in several contractual transactions within the group, which had eventually harmed the interests of the steelworks; that the request for authorisation to tap the applicant’s phone had been based on the suspicion that he had committed the offences of aggravated fraud (Article 250 of the Criminal Code) and money laundering (Article 255 of the Criminal Code); that the request had been drafted without consultation of the case file; that the interception had been necessary because it had not been possible to move the investigation forward without it; and that after the interception had been compromised the case file had been made available to various officials, including the Minister of Justice, who at that time also acted as the Minister of the Interior ad interim.
26.  On 21 September 2001 the Inspection Service dismissed the criminal complaint by the police director. It noted that a “committee of experts specialising in operational tasks” had been set up and “had detected no breach of the applicable regulations”. The interception had been authorised by a judge and had thus been lawful. There was no basis for scrutinising the judge’s decision. In conclusion, there was no case to answer. The decision has never been served on the applicant.
27.  According to the applicant, he had lodged some ten criminal complaints between 2001 and 2003 about the interception of his telephone conversations and mishandling of the verbatim records. Without submitting further details the applicant indicated that those complaints had been rejected without an appropriate examination of the facts.
28.  The chief editor of the daily Sme filed a criminal complaint after receipt of a transcription of the applicant’s telephone conversation with a journalist of Radio Free Europe. In the context of the proceedings a journalist of Sme was heard. On 14 November 2001 the police also heard the politician who had stated that he possessed 300 pages of copies of transcripts of the applicant’s telephone conversations. The applicant was involved in the proceedings as the injured party.
29.  The parties have not informed the Court about the outcome of the proceedings.
30.  In 2003 lieutenant colonel B., attached to the Inspection Service’s department specialised in combating corruption and organised crime, contacted the applicant and informed him that there was a general order within the Police Corps to reject all the applicant’s complaints. The police officer had been obliged to leave the police after he had started criminal proceedings upon one of the applicant’s complaints. In February and March 2003 that officer had complained to the Bratislava Higher Military Prosecutor’s office and to the General Prosecutor’s office about abuse of authority in the context of examination of the applicant’s complaints.
31.  The Government submitted a standpoint of the General Prosecutor dated 8 February 2007. It indicates that the above decision of the Inspection Service of 21 September 2001 had been taken in accordance with the law. As to the criminal complaints which officer B. had lodged in 2003, an investigator had set the case aside, on 19 July 2006, on the ground that no offence had been committed in the context of examination of the applicant’s complaints. Finally, reference was made to the reply which the General Prosecutor’s Office had sent to the applicant on 31 August 2001.